Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1660 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-06-19
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 113 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
A tense, taut and unsettling thriller, Hidden is a film that expertly follows television presenter Georges, whose seemingly perfect life is shattered when he receives a videotape. On it is a lengthy stream of surveillance footage of his home, shot from just across the street. And it’s just the first of many. Further tapes, accompanied by strange and disturbing drawings, start to arrive, leaving Georges, his wife and his teenage son unsettled.

The film slowly builds from there, as Georges starts looking to his past to try and find the answer to who is sending the tapes, only to find himself increasingly disturbed by the memories he recalls.

Grounded by excellent performances from Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, Hidden is a masterclass in slow-burning cinema. It has no easy answers, boasts some quite superb direction, and it’s also distinctly unconventional in how it goes about its business (right from the opening titles). Director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) cleverly works his story across several levels, and while, come the end credits, some may initially find themselves underwhelmed, here’s a film that stays in the brain long after the stop button has been pressed. Granted, it won’t be to all tastes, but those that do find themselves engrossed are likely to agree that this is one of the finest French films in many years.--Jon Foster

DVD Description
Writer/director Michael Haneke delivers a masterpiece of unsettlement. Life seems perfect for Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), a bourgeois Parisian couple who live in a comfortable home with their adolescent son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). But when an anonymous videotape turns up on their doorstep, showing their house under surveillance from across the street, their calm life begins to spiral out of control. Subsequent videotapes arrive, accompanied by mysterious drawings, and gradually Georges becomes convinced that he's being tormented by a figure from his past. But when he confronts him, the man assures Georges he is innocent. A growing sense of guilt begins to rise in Georges as he recalls his less-than-angelic childhood, yet for some reason he's unable to be completely honest with Anne. Soon, their happy home is an emotional battleground, leading to a climax that is breathtaking in its ferocity and ambiguousness.

Synopsis
Suburban couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil, JEAN DE FLORETTE) and Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) become the unwitting victims of an elaborate blackmail plot in this taught psychological thriller from master of suspense Michael Haneke (FUNNY GAMES). Georges, a television presenter, starts receiving anonymous packages containing videotapes of himself and his family secretly filmed from across the street. As the content of the packages becomes ever more threatening and personal, he begins to suspect that the perpetrator is someone he knows from his childhood. However as no crime has actually been committed, the police refuse to get involved, leaving Georges to take matters into his own hands. In doing so, he is forced to confront the ghosts from his past.

Customer Reviews

Subtlety of French culture wins out
The polarisation of reviews here seems to me to show the difference between Hollywood and European culture - the French tolerate ambiguity, Americans don't! Where the US film industry expects to provide its audience with a resolution to tie up all ends neatly, Haneke reminds us that life's not like that and to add an artificial ending would simply prevent the audience from using its intelligence to speculate on what happened next.

Far from being a "cop-out" ending, this is an enigmatic, almost elegaic ending to a beautifully crafted film in which the viewer eavesdrops on conversations and by inference is the voyeur intruding on the happy lives of Daniel Auteuil and Juliet Binoche (whose acting, free of the constraints of melodrama, is both minimalist and totally spellbinding.) Is the answer in the childhood of Georges, or through his son Pierrot? In the final analysis, it is we the audience who feel guilt for our unwitting participation and inertia as we observe the tragedy played out.

Haneke's subtlety and timing are wonderous. The joy of Hidden is how the atmosphere is built up through a silent soundtrack, glorious cinematography with lingering shots to build up a depth of understanding about the character's emotions, a spare script and the brilliant use of a sudden, unexpected shock. It leaves you edgy and uncomfortable without the need for explicit disclosure (except for one, very graphic instance) - and without closure the haunted feeling didn't leave my mind for hours afterwards

I came away feeling not cheated but slightly awe-struck, stimulated and challenged rather than force-fed. As such, I regard this as a very fine movie, worthy of comparison with great thrillers like Day of the Jackal.

Hidden
Caché - 'Hidden' - directed by Michael (The Piano Teacher) Haneke, is a masterclass on how to unnerve your audience, not through what you necessarily show but by what is indeed hidden from view. Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a bourgeois Parisian couple with a teenage son. Georges is presenter and producer of a literary debate tv show, a man with the power to edit the discussion within his programme and present an alternative version of the past to his viewers. But has Georges been economical with the truth of his family history? He and his wife begin receiving videotapes of their home, apparently filmed from across the street. The same viewpoint frustratingly forced upon the viewer in the opening credit sequence, this is one of many static shots in the film that provoke as many questions as they might at first seem to resolve. What at a first glance appear to be voyeuristic recordings in fact give nothing away.

More tapes follow - as do disturbing, childlike drawings of decapitated chickens, which hark back to a memory of Georges', which is made manifest in a nightmare. Is it an elborate prank being played by their son, who suspects his mother to be having an affair with a family friend, or something more sinister? Georges tracks down what he believes is the culprit to an estate in the Paris suburbs. There he is reunited with a man he has not seen since he was six years old, an orphaned Algerian who Georges' family had looked after as a boy when his parents were killed in the Paris massacre of immigrants in 1961. But Georges has a guilty secret. Did he, as a young boy, set up this Algerian orphan to be sent to a mental institution? Flashbacks give suggestions but, again, frustratingly, the full reality of the situation is obscured.

Caché skillfully and subtly plays with audience expectations, with most of its inner tensions unresolved apart from one brief and terrifyingly visceral moment. Against convention, this moment of extreme violence - as it involves the death of a key character - seeks to further bury and obstruct our access to the truth, while simultaneously heightening the suspence. The film could also be construed as a metaphor for France's inability come to terms with its relationship with Algeria, arrogantly rewriting its colonial past. But like much of the narrative, this is not made explicit, but is rather a further provocation in a film filled with subtle antagonisms. Brilliant.

Superb and thought-provoking
Unlike the last reviewer, I think Hidden is stunning. The lack of music doesn't bother me: the film is made with such subtlety and surefootedness that Haneke doesn't need the emotional prompting that so many films require from a soundtrack. Music can be great where it's needed and this film doesn't need it and would be spoiled by it. As for the patronising attitude to French films, what can one say. Don't like them, don't watch them. I admire the way this film-maker is prepared to entertain (yes!) and make his audience think.

The absence of closure is, of course, an essential element in the success of the film. Inevitably we speculate on the level of story - just who did send the tapes? However, as everyone recognises, the film is about more than the Laurents' and particularly George's guilt. Making a character responsible for the tapes would apportion 'guilt' and that is a key theme of the film: George's guilt; France's in relation to Algeria; the coalition's in relation to Iraq (it isn't for nothing that one scene has a news report from the Middle East in prominent background); the viewer's reponsibilities for events in their lives.

I read the film as exploring the nature of guilt, taking responsibility for what we do and the way(s) we go about that. At the end of the film, George has gone to bed, taken pills, shut out the world as much as he can. What he did as a child may be understandable, though unkind and cruel: he wanted his parents to himself, though it is clear and ironic that as an adult he doesn't want his mother or her farm at all.

That it isn't a conventional thriller is obvious from the opening frame though it exploits elements of the genre: there is no 'set up' or equilibrium to be disrupted beyond the duration of shot one until the tape is rewound: the first shot throws us into the mystery of the surveillance, as though it had always existed (perhaps like the stirrings of George's conscience/guilt for his childhood behaviour).

The handling of point of view is brilliant and unsettling too: much of the time we are unsure whose eyes we are seeing through. It also seems to me that the whole movie could, in a sense, not really be happening but represents George's fear of his guilty conscience.

I wouldn't claim to be able to give a masterclass on this film and understand every nuance, but that's OK: I only saw it last night for the first time, and it has been pre-occupying me since. I shall certainly be going back to enjoy its thought provoking narrative and superb craftsmanship. A great film.